by submission | Sep 6, 2008 | Story
Author : Nik Gregory
The mess hall bustled around Harris; it was like a flock of vultures who had just found an overturned meat truck. Possession yields not only extended onto property but onto food too, woe betide anyone who gets the last muffin.
“All I’m saying is there’s something therapeutic about blowing up an asteroid,” stated Harris, feeling his point needed no justification.
“Spreading atomic waste throughout the entire cosmos is not what I call a therapeutic activity,” retorted Mila. She came from one of the nameless countries affected by the mass crawl into nuclear arms – it wasn’t nameless, just no one knew how to pronounce it except for Mila.
“Honey, we take the green pills for the bio’s, yellow ones for the chems, blue ones for the millisieverts and the red ones for the gammas,” said Hank; he sat scratching his sun burnt nose with the end of his spoon. “So I call bull on that.”
She conceded defeat and flickered a smile of someone half her age, “Well on that, we just got twenty moles and five scarabs in a courier this morning.”
“Twenty moles?” asked Hank.
“Yeah.”
“Shit, what do they expect us to blow up with that?”
Harris hit his head against the table, “We’re supposed to mine them, after all we are miners.”
“But how else are we supposed to split an asteroid down the fault lines? You can’t stick a prybar between two faults of nickel and push when they’re a million metric tonnes.” Hank pulled a cigar out of his breast pocket and tapped it on the table. “So Mila, what are you doing this evening?”
“I have a date with Guy Mitchells,” came her answer with an extra coy smile on the side.
“Oh, sorry,” said Harris in a mocking tone. “Are all the Walkers taken now?”
“I sure as fuck ain’t,” muttered Hank before sticking the cigar in his mouth.
“No, just they come from a small genetic pool.” She gestured toward Ed and Ted, a pair of non-related identical twins – their genetic line had stayed separate for over two millennia yet they ended up with identical fashion, beards and even the same scar gouged over their right eye.
“Okay that’s a valid point.”
“Hell yeah it is, we Walkers ain’t exactly a pretty bunch,” stated Hank to a puff of smoke, his stubbly chin seemingly more prominent through the haze.
“That’s why I picked a land lover.” She looked down the line to see Guy approach, his shoulders slenderer than hers and every other Walker.
He leant over, kissed her gently on the cheek and grabbed her muffin, “Thanks babe!”
Harris muttered, “Noob,” along with Hank.
“Oh, ‘hon’, one sec,” started Mila. She right hooked Guy, sending him toppling to the coarse regolith based concrete as she swiped back her muffin.
Mila’s attention drifted to the two guys and she said clemently, “What, it was the last one!”
by Sam Clough | Sep 5, 2008 | Story
Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer
“Elass, check your drones. I think they’re goofing off.”
“Thanks, Laurie. They’re on target now.”
The fleet was deep in the ‘gravel’ region of the asteroid belt. Elass was dragging in the larger chunks for processing, Laurie was filtering the gravel, looking for chunks of dirty ice and pure metals. Red was sitting ten clicks out, on overwatch. When the fleet had set up shop, they’d deployed a small field-generator to hold the proceeds of their rockmunching. It was maybe two-thirds full of chunks of ice and mineral-rich rocks.
Red was bored. Whilst the miners were at least actively involved in their task, all Red had to do was watch the stash and look for intruders. The company stipulated that there had to be at least one combat craft with every mining op, after the spate of Free Rhean attacks had taken out maybe half the fleet. That was two years before Red had signed up: ‘overwatch’ had sounded so exciting at the time. He’d escorted dozens of mining operations now, mostly with Elass and Laurie, but sometimes with other pairs.
“Ejecting slag, watch yourselves.” Laurie transmitted.
With a little puff of dust, a chunk of compacted wasterock fired out from the midsection of Laurie’s vessel, the ‘Grave Robber’. The projectile held coherence for twenty kilometres or so, then slowly disintegrated into dust. There were a half-dozen plumes of finely-divided dust diffusing ‘above’ the plane of the belt.
Red watched the projectile as it broke up.
The dust moved oddly. Like something was pushing through it.
Stealth!
With motions born of long practice in virtuals, Red started actively pinging the area and accelerated towards the dust-cloud and the covert ops pilot that had just made such a silly mistake. His sensors were betraying him, the dust interfering with the absolute ranging. Half a dozen half-contacts were lurking in the dust plumes. Red warmed up the missile launcher, and powered onwards.
Elass cursed as one of his drones stopped responding. Cheap links occasionally meant that they went dead in space, and needed to be jumpstarted. Hopefully, that’s all it was – sometimes, their proximity sensors just refused to work, and they ended up smeared all over the outside of a rock. Lousy good-for-nothing corporation refused to pay for decent equipment, then acted all surprised when you came back with half your complement acting up. His rambling train of thought was interrupted by the beeping of the ‘communication request’ alert above his head. It was the hauler – the box-with-engines that dragged the ice and rock back to a an orbital refinery.
He keyed the local area radio.
“…’sup?” The voice coming through the radio was unfamiliar, not the usual hauler pilot.
“Not much. You’re early, though. Squeeze your auth key to me and I’ll unlock the field.”
“Who do you think I am?”
“The hauler.”
“Moron.” The not-hauler approached the the storage field. The entire front of the bulky craft folded. It smoothly enveloped the storage field like a snake choking down an egg. Laurie hit the all-fleet-alert. Elass panicked, and pushed every thruster he had to max. They flared, and burnt out. Communications from Elass were a garbled mess of swear of words before Laurie broke the line.
The thief twisted his ship into an escape vector. A dozen missiles streaked from launchers mounted onto his outer hull. They automatically locked in on the hapless miners.
Red grimaced, and muttered to himself.
“I’m so fired for this.”
by submission | Sep 4, 2008 | Story
Author : Rayne Adams
I stole a lightspeed cruiser today. Went flying.
Found Ancient Egypt.
You learn in school that time and space are the same interchangeable abstract, but no one really believes it. You walk three steps, you move forward in space and in time, but if you walk backward, you don’t go back in time. Do you? I didn’t think so.
I had to get as far away as possible—I’d stolen a very expensive, very advanced piece of machinery. I set the lightspeed engine to 2400, more than five hundred lightyears higher than is considered safe. I followed protocol—closed the airlock, strapped myself in, and inhaled the gas that would keep me in a stasis state during my trip. No one has ever traveled lightspeed while they were conscious.
I don’t know if the gas in that particular cruiser was bad, or if I just hadn’t taken it the right way, but I woke up long before I should have, nowhere near the end of my journey.
I wasn’t in space. At least, not any space I’d ever seen before. Space is black, so black it’s sickening to look at after awhile. But this was color, swirling lights and blinding color. Sounds too, which don’t belong in space. The cruiser was gone, and I seemed to be as well. I couldn’t move my arms or turn my head, I was just consciousness floating somewhere in this vast, fluctuating whirlpool.
I became aware that whatever was around me was growing very warm. This didn’t concern me—after they entered the academy, all Spacers had their epidermis upgraded to be able to withstand great heat and pressure. It was still very uncomfortable, but at least that meant my body was back.
When I swam into consciousness, I was lying on my back in something soft and pleasantly warm, not scalding. There were people standing over me, staring down and talking, arguing. Their words jumbled together as the translator in my brain wavered between several different languages. They weren’t speaking a tongue it recognized, so it had to spend a few moments cross-referencing.
It didn’t take too long.
“—Fell from the sky! How could she not be of the gods?”
“She doesn’t look like one of us.”
“Is she even alive? Gods do not die.”
“I’m not dead,” I said, sitting up, my mouth flawlessly forming the words of this strange new language.
The three people standing over me jumped back, frightened, until one of the men offered me a hand up. I was completely naked (my clothes hadn’t survived the heat) but one of my rescuers was a woman, and her loose white robe only covered one breast, so I decided not to worry too much.
“Where am I?” I asked, though I didn’t really need the answer. The white sand, wide, blue river, and clean, breathable air was enough evidence in itself.
“Welcome to the land of Kemat, great Isis.” One of the men said it, and they all bowed their heads.
“Thanks, I—.” I cleared my throat. “What did you just call me?”
“Isis,” the woman said, eyes still cast to the sand. “Goddess of the Nile. Every year you shed tears for your dead husband and the river floods.”
“I’m not a goddess,” I said, but they weren’t listening.
by submission | Aug 31, 2008 | Story
Author : W. Kevin Christian
A monotone, bureaucratic female voice shot through the hearing centers of Felicity’s brain: “Free-form imagination, courtesy of The Sensation Station. Free-form imagination, courtesy of The Sensation Station.” On and on it went until the computer had fully mapped the physical structure of her brain. Suddenly Felicity was walking through a wheat field where she grew up. The moon was full and orange. Hundreds of shooting stars rocketed across the night sky. One came down and slowly cruised by Felicity’s head, its tail leaving a trail of floating diamonds, glittering like fireworks.
The last and greatest vehicle of human creativity was a manually controlled artificial reality on the only entertainment device anyone cared about: The Sensation Station. All other entertainment had become obsolete seven years earlier.
In free-form imagination, what one thought became one’s reality. The possibilities were endless. Not even God himself knew the limits of the unbridled infinity of human creativity channeled through The Sensation Station. Of course most people just used it to have sex in a hot tub with movie star A. But Felicity was different.
Before The Sensation Station, Felicity had been a real book worm. She loved to escape to the vivid worlds she could manifest in her mind. She painted, too. She made sad, silly and fantastic paintings, full of vibrant, burning colors.
Felicity’s first artificial pleasure was imagining herself as the coldest she had ever been, naked and alone on the North Pole. She waited until she could bear it no more and then dumped herself into a hot shower. Felicity had saved the first five seconds of that shower and put it on repeat for hours. The computer daydreams were indescribable pleasure. Divine. Perfect. Satisfying. They had cost Felicity her job.
And her family, kids, home, and car. Right now she was sitting next to a dumpster behind a Denny’s where she had found an unguarded electrical socket to plug in. Her rail thin frame sat hunched against a filth-covered fence. She was dying. Two golf-ball-sized electrodes were attached to her temples with wires running down to a wallet-sized receiver that lay limply in her half-open palm. Drool ran down her chin. Blood trickled out her ears.
Something the creators of The Sensation Station had never anticipated was the ability of the technology to intensify consciousness. Felicity’s imagination was expanding at a frightening rate. Where once she had been satisfied to focus and repeat one good sensation, Felicity now combined hundreds, thousands, millions – the ecstasy of gods. There was no limit.
Felicity set her imagination for the heart of the universe. If God didn’t exist, she was about to create him. She flew up into the sky, into space, out of the solar system. Her perspective increased to a galactic level. The whole universe unfolded at the limitless command of her creativity. Somewhere inside she knew—she had always known—what it was to be a star, an ocean, a banker, a pulsar, a honey bee, a fry cook, a sonic boom, a mountain, a crying baby, a falling leaf, a cloud, a proton, an orgasm, a primal scream. Matter ended. Energy became infinite. Time was reformed. Somewhere in some fold of some reality a force of ten billion supernovas was released. A new universe was born.
by Stephen R. Smith | Aug 25, 2008 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Marshal’s great grandfather had taken up the guitar as a older man, and played it as though he simply always had done so. He had passed this love onto his son, Marshal’s grandfather, before the Departure. Marshal’s family had always been tradesman, and his grandfather used his degrees in micro-fabrication to get on the ship, and his skill at coaxing sounds from his stringed instrument to secure not only a wife, but a place in the social scene on Discovery when she set off into the stars.
Marshal’s grandfather had one child on the voyage, a daughter, and she grew up always at her father’s side, basking in the warmth of his music. She took up chemistry, and divided her time between misusing chemicals in defiance of the ships authority, and caressing deep rhythm and blues from the guitar her father had left her.
When Marshal was born, it was clear his mother’s chemical abuse had affected him, but she didn’t survive his birth to make amends.
Marshal grew in the care of the crew to be a stoic but directionless young man. He dabbled in chemistry, in microbiology, and settled on psiono-sonics as a field of study. He found he had a heightened sensitivity in communications, and was tasked with reaching out across the void of space to the other star ships en route to new star systems.
In time, the voices grew harder and harder to find through the darkness, and communications duty became an eternity of projecting into nothingness, deafened by the silence returned.
When the star drive began to fail, Marshal felt it before anyone. He tried to describe to the Captain how the engine was losing its rhythm, how he worried it would stop beating.
He’d been thrown off the bridge, and confined to his quarters.
When the star drive went out, the captain locked himself in his own cabin, refusing to acknowledge it was true.
Marshal had spent very little time in his own cabin, having not grown up there, and finding it unsettling to be in the room this mother he had never known had once called home. He could never connect himself to the space, but now, confined there as he was, he found himself idly picking through her things, discovering the woman who had made him and then left him here alone.
He flipped through frames of images, some single and still, some sequenced and moving. He heard laughter, saw a smile he recognized sometimes from the mirror, and felt a rhythm that resonated somewhere inside.
When he found her guitar, it fit his hands like well worn gloves, filled a hole he hadn’t realized existed. His fingers found the chords to a song he’d never heard. A to C sharp, to G sustained, back to A. Words drifted into his head with impossible clarity, “If you can just get your mind together, then come on across to me.” Across the ship each psionicly projected note from Marshal’s guitar turned every surface capable of vibrating into a point of amplification. Everyone stopped, and listened. “We’ll hold hands and then we’ll watch the sunrise,” people spilled into the hallways, “from the bottom of the sea.”
Marshal felt long closed doors open in his mind as he reached out into the depths of space. He felt the wave come back a hundred strong, and the Discovery reeled as unseen voices chimed in “But First, are you experienced?” In his cabin, the Captain closed his eyes, tears streaming down his face. They may be lost, but they were no longer alone.
